Enter the Automaton: the phenomenon of hyper-obedience

   

Over a century ago, Henry David Thoreau wrote the famous work “Civil Disobedience,” in which he expounded his views on obedience to authority.  Simply stated, the essay holds that each citizen has the moral and ethical obligation to disobey civil authorities if he perceives that any laws and/or dictates set forth by the government are unjust or immoral.

Thoreau was an idealistic man, imbued with a profound sense of conscience and social responsibility, and his position derives a measure of support from the fact that Thoreau himself spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax on grounds that the right to vote should not be a taxable “commodity.” Henry David Thoreau appears to have been a man who practiced what he preached.

Today, Thoreau is required reading in many American Literature courses.  Presumably, certain elements within the American educational establishment believe that Thoreau’s ideas may be useful towards instilling a sense of ethics into its students, thus creating the morally refined citizens of tomorrow – citizens who are continually questioning and evaluating their government.  Such a person is thought by many to be the ‘ideal citizen’ – the perfect expression of Democracy at work.

This sounds good on paper, but is it a realistic viewpoint? Can we really expect the “average” citizen to defer to conscience and morality if the heavy hand of government – a government turned malevolent - should come to rest upon him?

Consider the work of two prominent research psychologists – the late Dr. Stanely Milgram of Yale University and Dr. Irving Janis, also of Yale.  Both men were concerned with studying the phenomenon of obedience to authority.  What they discovered stands in stark contrast to the idealism of Thoreau.  To summarize their basic conclusions, both have found that ordinary people will readily abandon their sense of moral and ethical responsibility when a superior authority, or authorities, requires them to do so.  Dr. Milgram found that such authority need only be vested in a single authority figure; Janis’ work suggests that authority may also be vested in a cohesive group of individuals, where peer pressure comes to bear.  Despite the subtle differences in their ideas, both men have shed light on the same disturbing phenomenon – obedience to authority even when compliance conflicts with common moral values.     

Dr. Milgram derived his results on the phenomenon of “hyper-obedience” by designing a series of controlled experiments for testing a paid volunteer’s willingness to administer a painful shock to another subject when ordered to do so by an authority figure (in this case, the experimenter).  In the original experiment, documented in Milgram’s “The Perils Of Obedience,” Dr. Milgram solicited volunteers from the mass of students at Yale, ostensibly to participate in a study on learning and punishment.  Two volunteers at a time came into Milgram’s laboratory.  One volunteer was given the role of “teacher,” and his job was to administer an electric shock, in steadily increasing voltages with each failure of the learner to respond correctly.  The shocks ranged from 10-450 volts.

   

Unbeknownst to the teacher, the student strapped in the “electric chair” was a counterfeit – a paid actor.  He was instructed to act out his part quite convincingly, screaming horribly as the voltage increased, pleading for the termination of the experiment.  In reality, no shock was being administered.  But the test was established.  How far would the teacher go, at the prodding of the experimenter?*

   

In the essay, Milgram recounts how he sought predictions about the outcome of the experiment before undertaking it.  Among the psychiatrists that he surveyed, the predictions largely favored “man the moral entity” – the majority of the psychiatrists predicted that most subjects would refuse to obey the commands of the experimenter.

   

So Milgram put his colleagues’ predictions to test, discovering, much to his surprise, that the predictions were wrong.  In the first experiments, nearly sixty percent of the subjects “…obeyed the orders of the experimenter to the end, punishing the victim until they reached the most potent shock available on the generator.”

   

Needless to say, these results were quite “shocking” to both Milgram and his colleagues.  The experiment was repeated in different settings and persons from differing social strata were drawn as volunteers.  But the disturbing results did not go away.  As Milgram stated:   ”…the experiment’s total outcome was the same as we had observed among the students.”

   

This, then, is the essence of Milgram’s work.  It is very similar, as stated previously, to the ideas of Dr. Janis on the phenomenon of groupthink, which Janis has outlined in his essay entitled, “Groupthink: psychological studies of policy decisions and fiascoes.”  In Janis’ own words groupthink constitutes

   

“…social pressures that develop in cohesive groups: in infantry platoons, air crews, therapy groups, seminars, and self study or encounter groups.  Members tend to evolve informal objectives to preserve friendly intra-group relations, and this becomes part of the hidden agenda at their meetings.”

   

Janis cites a few historic events where groupthink may have played a considerable role in the disastrous outcomes – disasters such as Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs fiasco.  I have chosen another example that provides an excellent illustration of the groupthink phenomenon in action:  the top-level meeting held at NASA headquarters on the eve of the space shuttle Challenger’s ill-fated flight in 1986.

   

At that meeting, Dr. Allen McDonald, along with several other Morton-Thiokol engineers, voiced strong objections to the proposed launch because of concerns over an approaching mass of Arctic air.  These objections were summarily overruled when a NASA manager exclaimed: “My God, Thiokol, when do you want me to launch?  Next April?”  Regarding that comment, the March 3, 1986 issue of Newsweek stated

    “As Allen Mc Donald told it, that exasperated protest from NASA was the key moment.  Under the gun, the managers of Morton-Thiokol Inc. overruled their engineers and signed approval for the Challenger to blast off.”

   

Janis stated, as one of the criterion for groupthink in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, that “selective bias was shown in the way the members reacted to information and judgments from experts…they were only interested in facts and opinions that supported their preferred policy.” In the case of the Challenger meeting, the NASA managers’ “preferred policy” was to launch the Space Shuttle on the following morning at 11:30 A.M. Eastern Standard Time.  Dissenting opinions were at odds with this policy, and so the “upstarts” were brought into line through group pressure, and induced to sign off on the launch, despite strong objections (which later proved to be valid).

   

Thus we can see that this succumbing to group pressure, this “groupthink,” is not merely a esoteric theory for philosophic debate, but is, rather, a very real phenomenon with often disastrous results.  And hyper-obedience seems to have its truest expression wherever the superior/subordinate relationship is very clear-cut.  The NASA managers, on their own turf at the Kennedy Space Center, clearly had the upper-hand over the Morton-Thiokol engineers, who were only employees of one of NASA’s many contractors.  Likewise, in Milgram’s experiments, the teacher is clearly subordinate to the authority of the experimenter.  The experimenter is a PhD affiliated with a major university, and the teacher is merely a volunteer being paid a modest sum for his time.  Finally, in Janis’ theory, the individual is clearly subordinate to the authority of the group at large.  One opinion is hard pressed to prevail against ten dissenting ones.

   

Milgram may give us some insight into this potent superior/subordinate relationship when he says, in regard to the teacher’s role in his experiment:  “To extricate himself from his plight, the subject must make a clear break with authority.” In Milgram’s experiment this would translate into the adamant, even angry, refusal to continue shocking the learner.  Likewise, in Janis’ scenario, the “deviant” would have to refuse to back down, despite the disdain of the group at large.  Only in this way would it be possible to alter the directive of the group, or at least free oneself from the burden of responsibility by withdrawing support from the group’s decisions.

   

Of all the rigid superior/subordinate relationships, none are more well-established than those in the nation’s military.  The nation’s armed forces are founded on hyper-obedience.  When an enlisted man is given an order by a superior officer, it is generally accepted that he must obey.  It is only reasonable, then, to expect the problems outlined by Milgram and Janis to manifest in a military situation.**  Indeed, the massacre at My Lai, Vietnam, in which one Lt. Calley directed the murders of  Vietnamese civilians, is a profound example of the power of hyper-obedience.

   

As Stanley Resor’s official report on the massacre documents, the entire company of soldiers under Lt. Calley acted pursuant to his orders, unquestionably gunning down the men, women and children of My Lai Hamlet.  Milgram’s essay “Obedience in Vietnam” includes a CBS interview of one of the My Lai participants, conducted by Mike Wallace, in which the soldier recounts the following gruesome aspect of the massacre:  “He said (Lt. Calley), “I want them dead.”…so I started shooting…I poured about four clips into the group.”

   

Various other aspects of the massacre are recounted in similarly gruesome detail – it’s not essential to cover them all. But one significant quote from the soldier cannot be omitted because it concerns the rationalizations of the soldier in regard to his immoral actions:  “Why did I do it?  Because I felt like I was ordered to do it….”

   

This rationalization was commonly invoked by the teachers in Milgram’s study.  The volunteers tried to free themselves from guilt by stating that they had only done what was required of them – they were simply following instructions.  Indeed, one teacher who was tottering on the edge of disobedience was reassured when the experimenter claimed complete responsibility, and obediently proceeded to shock the learner repeatedly at 450 volts.

   

For some reason, many humans have the capacity to psychologically disengage themselves from a sense of responsibility when committing an immoral act, as long as they are acting pursuant to the orders of an authority figure.  As Milgram states in “Obedience in Vietnam”:

    
 “A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority.”

   

Adolf Eichmann, who engineered the mass-exterminations of millions of innocents in Germany, is another example that Milgram invokes in “Perils.”  When on trial in Israel for his war crimes, he repeatedly claimed that he had only been carrying out orders.

   

But like all others who invoke this rationalization, Eichmann was guilty.  The key point that these individuals overlook is that that the option of disobedience does exist.  Granted, in Eichmann’s case the result of such disobedience would have probably been an appointment with the firing squad.  But the subjects in Milgram’s experiment faced no such life-or-death imperative – they simply administered the shocks in an effort to be polite and cooperative with the experimenter.  Milgram has considered this strange displacement of morality in “Perils”:

    “What is extraordinary is his apparent total indifference to the learner; he hardly takes cognizance of him as a human being.  Meanwhile, he relates to the experimenter in a submissive and courteous fashion….Morality does not disappear – it acquires a radically different focus: the subordinate person feels shame or pride depending on how adequately he has performed the actions called for by authority.”

   

Similarly, in Janis’ theory, the deviant succumbs to the will of the group often just to “…preserve friendly intra-group relations….” Again, the odd displacement of morality is obvious.     

In the case of the My-Lai Massacre, I submit that both Milgram’s and Janis’ versions of hyper-obedience played important roles.  While engaging in unquestioning obedience to a single authority figure, the soldiers were also acting as part of a highly cohesive group.  For any single soldier to disobey orders would have constituted a break with the group as well as Lt. Calley.

   

Hyper-obedience is an intriguing but terrifying phenomenon.  It suggests that seemingly moral persons have the built in capacity to commit truly vile acts under certain circumstances.  In “Obedience in Vietnam” Milgram concludes:

    “The results…raise the possibility that human nature, or – more specifically – the kind of character produced is American Democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhuman treatment at the direction of malevolent authority….”

   

Enter the automaton.

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*Milgram was severely criticized by many of his colleagues, among others, on grounds that his experiments were unethical, with potential for causing psychological harm to the volunteers. The author agrees with these criticisms, and the discussion of Milgram’s work in this essay should not be taken as tacit approval of same.

**In the context of military law, there are situations where a subordinate may rightfully disobey a direct order from one’s superior; however, taking the overall nature of war into account along with the harsh realities of the battlefield, the line between “moral and immoral” is a complex issue. For a good, brief discussion on this subject see this article.  

The Fundamental Rapture of Conservative Politics

This was originally published at G+, as commentary regarding the article Belief in biblical end-times stifling climate change action in U.S.: study. 
Since these comments are generally written at G+ and posted on the fly, you can expect to see some addenda and clean up of articles as time allows, after they are posted to Blogger.
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As a few people here at G+ know, I was raised in an apocalyptic sect (or some would say, "cult") - namely, the Jehovah's Witnesses - and this gives me considerable insight into the mind of those who hearken wholesale to such dogma, particularly in regard to what they see as their "responsibility" towards the earth and the rest of humanity (which we shall hold in contrast to those who rightly believe that all our problems, be they social or environmental, are ours and ours alone to solve, without divine intervention.)

I have studied other apocalyptic sects, and will make a nod to them as necessary.

First of all, a "doomsday" cult does not necessarily prophesy the end of the world. More commonly, they prophesy something along the lines of a Messianic return ("Christ's second coming") whereupon the wicked will be exterminated (and all the birds of heaven come to the "great feast" - Revelation 19:17)). In the context of JW beliefs, the "wicked" comprise those who, after having their doors knocked upon, reject the message. In other words, JWs basically see everyone they meet who is not a JW as crow bait. The job of the faithful, then, in knocking upon doors,  is to separate the "sheep from the goats," the sheep being those who are willing, indeed eager, to be led.  The "goats" are those who "rely on their own understanding," rather than relying on holy scripture, as interpreted by a body of old men in a room at JW headquarters in Brooklyn, NY, and duly handed down as "heavenly food" in the form of JW's copious publications.

The JWs refer to this proselytization as "the great work." When this great work is completed, and all human beings everywhere have had their doors knocked upon and have either accepted or rejected the message, "then the end will come." The goats will be exterminated by a heavenly army of angels led by Christ; the sheep will be saved. After the battle is over, the birds will pick the bones clean and remaining humans will assist in the cleanup. Meanwhile, Satan and his fallen angels (demons), who are ultimately responsible for all this mayhem, will be chained in "the abyss" for 1000 years, during which time the survivors of the war, and those legions from bygone days who were worthy of being resurrected from the dead, will begin the work of turning the Earth into a paradise. At the end of the 1000 years, the devil will be loosed for "a short time" to give the faithful a final temptation. All those who resist temptation will then live forever on a paradise earth; meanwhile, the devil will be utterly destroyed with his demons and those who succumbed to his wiles during the "final test."

All of this is background, so we can make sense of the question: what do JWs feel is their responsibility towards society and towards the environment? Other than the rule that they must be "lawful" within the context of secular law (except where it violates God's law), they adhere to their spiritual hope. In short, they are law abiding and peaceful, but they look to God and not to man to solve the problems of humankind. What does mean for them, as far as the environment is concerned? They give lip service to the idea that we are meant to protect the earth, or perhaps more accurately to "husband" it well, and they often refer to the scripture ("God will ruin those ruining the earth" - Revelation 11:18). But in terms of being socially active to try to mitigate something like greenhouse warming, or acid rain, etc. - they are not. They would never join an org like Greenpeace or the Sierrra Club or WWF and become active in such groups, protesting, writing letters, etc. Here's why (and this is important):

•  Because of their "spiritual hope," they do not involved themselves in "earthly affairs," e.g., politics, voting, military service, secular groups/clubs, etc.

• Fighting for environmental causes would be seen as taking time away from the real work of spreading the news of the impending apocalypse. Their "great work" is the real way to save the earth.

• Becoming a militant environmentalist could be seen almost as an abrogation of faith. If there is greenhouse warming, God will fix it.

*And that's the real bottom line.* God is going to fix it. No need for the faithful to hammer away at it. Our job is to spread the good news that God is going to fix it someday.

Another apocalyptic sect are the 7th Day Adventists, who interestingly enough, are a splinter group* off the same original 19th century religious movement "The Millerites." led by William Miller (1782-1849). If the dogma of both religions are compared, there are significant similarities and differences. No need to go into them here; it would be prohibitive. Suffice it to say that they both hold that there will be a "final battle" to decide things in the future, ergo, Armageddon.

There are other "apocalyptic sects." These are two large, well-established ones, but neither do they have much political influence, because the JWs are prohibited from engaging in civic and political affairs - even playing sports in school, school government, etc., is discouraged, as are all holidays, both civic and religious. The 7th day Adventists do vote, but are discouraged from becoming involved in politics for the same reasons as JWs.

There is one more element I must speak of here, because it's probably the most important, the most pertinent, in regard to this discussion (all of the former discussion has been to show how profoundly a certain dogma may alter the individual's perception of engagement in "social mitigation" of environmental problems), The element I refer to are "fundamentalist Christians," often called "fundies" or "born-againers." I refer not to a "classical" sort of fundamentalism, here, but to a specific movement whose philosophical underpinnings were laid down around the 1830s and became noteworthy within the U.S. by the early 1900s. But  rather than becoming the foundation a single church in its own right, the essential dogma was, rather, _distributed across a whole range of Christian sects._

The dogma I refer to is "The Rapture," the idea that as earth enters into this time of tribulation (Armageddon) all faithful Christians will be instantly transported to heaven. Bingo, the guy in front of you just goes - poof, he's gone. The unfaithful "riff-raff," and in particular the Jews (who rejected the Messiah), will be left behind. This idea, as noted, has been weaving its way into the dogma of existing churches since the 1870s, but it got a major boost in the 1970s, becoming a sort of pop-phenomenon with the release of Hal Lindsey's book The Late, Great Planet Earth:

"a treatment of literalist, premillennial, dispensational eschatology. As such, it compared end-time prophecies in the Bible with then-current events in an attempt to broadly predict future scenarios leading to the rapture of believers before the tribulation and Second Coming of Christ to establish his thousand-year (i.e. millennial) Kingdom on Earth."

...It became a bestseller, "... the first Christian prophecy book to be picked up by a secular publisher (Bantam, 1973) and sell many copies.... "

Also:

" ...Despite some dated content, 28 million copies had sold by 1990. The film, The Late Great Planet Earth, narrated by Orson Welles, was one of the top grossing domestic movies in 1979..."

This presented the ideas of the Rapture anew, in a modern context, along with apocalyptic prophecies. Suddenly, being a fundie was sort of cool, and I won't even guess how many were "born again" after seeing this movie and reading the book.

To cut this short, many of these individuals incorporated this into their worldviews, regardless of their Christian sect; others formed new sects. Heralding from sects not having proscriptions on being politically active, they indulged in matters of civic and political import, carrying their Rapture beliefs into political office, but not necessarily expounding on them from their political pulpit.

Point (and this is the conclusion): If you're a self-proclaimed "fundie"or "born-againer" in a political office today, I submit that you have been exposed to, and quite likely hold to, the dogma of the Rapture.* Thus, a philosophy which holds that we are in the end times,when all the Jews and Atheists and Dirty Commies, et al, will be "plowed under" while the good Christians disappear in the blink of an eye, Raptured up into heaven.

How strong an impetus is there, then, to take on the issue of global warming as a problem to be solved by people, for people, when you're sold on the Rapture? Wouldn't the Rapture underpin your whole worldview?

Sources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapture

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late,_Great_Planet_Earth

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerismhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millerism

*Some hold that the Jehovah's Witnesses are not a "splinter group," per se, off of Millerism, but rather had "strong Adventist influences."  I think this may simply be a matter of quibbling, and that "splintering" versus "influences" is simply a matter of semantics - the chief source of the "influences" interpretation itself comes from early JW literature, and having been a member of this sect, I know they are highly selective in their interpretations of practically everything, so as to cast themselves in the best possible light, rather than suggesting that the "expression of God's Kingdom on Earth" (as they believe they are) could in any way be fickle or flawed. Indeed, regarding the infamous 1975 "end of the world" prediction, their official position in church literature was that no such prediction had ever been made, and that those who sold their houses, etc., had simply misinterpreted what was said in regard to 1975. Highly "revisionist, rather Orwellian.

Awaiting Comet ISON

Astronomer David Levy once said "Comets are like cats: they have tails, and they do precisely what they want." This means that it's notoriously difficult to predict how bright any incoming comet will appear from Earth -  and seemingly promising comets  have disappointed before, failing to perform as expected. Having noted this, according to the most optimistic predictions for comet ISON, which arrives in the inner solar system next autumn/winter, it could become as bright as the full moon, the brightest comet since the Great Comet of 1680.

 

Source SPACE.com: All about our solar system, outer space and exploration

FLASH: Hunter Gatherer Makes Good, Gets Technology, Builds Incredibly Screwed Up Civilization

I wrote the following comment in reply to a post Giselle Minoli wrote at Google+, specifically in response to the question Matthew Graybosch posed with respect to the subject of her post. I have since been asked to blog my reply, so it might be more easily shared. This is quite easy to do, now that G+ and Blogger are integrated.(Reading Giselle's original post and Matthew's comment immediately following will help orient you as to the nature of the discussion).

How did we forget? Why did we forget?

That's the question of the century - possibly even the millennium - and when it gets down to it, New York, being the earliest and greatest of the American primate cities - is a model of the same phenomenon being repeated across the nation, in hierarchies of differing scales.

I think one could go on listing various factors, social, political and economic that have influenced and do influence the "state of the Union," right now, and we can carry those back as far as they go (and some go back a very long way). They are pertinent and valid; some of them have been mentioned in your previous discussions.

But suppose that there is something intrinsic to our natures which, when brought into combination with increasingly "modern" and artificial life styles engenders a huge array of social, economic, and political problems. That is, there is a set of qualities, intrinsic to our natures via Homo sapiens sapiens evolutionary history, that continue to operate and in fact may even "drive" the course of our lives within these artificial, wholly cerebral and even arbitrary, constructs that comprise our increasingly artificial society. The result of this is an increasingly large array of social, economic, and political problems, the farther we get away from our "intrinsic" natures.

Consider that the role evolution prepared us for is that of the hunter gatherer. Consider that the characteristics that were selected for as we evolved were those that augmented that role - characteristics that made us more likely to survive and reproduce. Language (spoken and written), abstract reasoning and toolmaking (coupled with the precision grip afforded by our opposable thumb and forefingers) gave us the ability to move beyond our hunter gatherer natures to do other things that the mindless selectivity of nature could not possibly have foreseen.

First came the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, where we learned how to grow the plants we once foraged and to domesticate and husband certain of the animals that we once hunted. We then shifted from nomadic bands of hunter gatherers to sedentary agrarians. First big change.

But we were still hunter gatherers. We were still born baby Cro-Magnons.

Bring it up to the future, to the Industrial Revolution. The same skills that enabled us to build Atalatls, huts, and stone/bone tools, to observe the patterns of the seasons, of animal migrations, to engage in cooperative hunting, to transmit technological and cultural information through oral histories...our abilities to abstract and imagine and make those abstractions and imaginings real...these also enabled us to build great cities and automobiles and extract fossil fuels from the earth, to build freeways and factories and machines and assault rifles and atom bombs and rocket ships. And the crude currency systems of the past (also a product of our ability to abstract) evolved into more and more finely tuned systems, which then were further tweaked and tuned by theorists, to "serve" all of the aforementioned.

But through all of this, we were still hunter gatherers. We were still born Cro-Magnons.

Is it unreasonable to suppose that our own natures came into conflict with the fruits of our own ingenuity?

Consider: the disorder ADHD has been given much attention in recent years. Most of us are aware of the symptoms of this disorder. Inability in children to sit still, to focus, to follow instructions, and a tendency to be easily distracted by even small stimuli. All these are highly problematic in the classroom.

But what use might these qualities be to a hunter gatherer? Lots of excess energy...very useful in running down injured prey. Likewise, being easily distracted means that they will be hyper-attuned to every little movement in the bushes, everything they see out of the corner of their eye....

Well, clearly this is not definitive, but it is suggestive of what I'm trying to get at. Here we are, thrust into this future where the technology now accelerates with frightening speed. We live immersed in vast cities of strangers, immersed in our technology, but...

We're still hunter gatherers. Still out in the forest looking for our supper.  We are born little Cro Magnons, and in the first seven years of our lives we are dragged through 10,000 years of technological evolution, to reach a point where "technological" and "cultural" are in many ways synonymous. And the things that our intrinsic nature allowed us to do as hunter gatherers are increasingly ill-suited to serve us as technology transforms from year to year.

Now, as computer technology continues to accelerate, what crosses the minds of the hunter gatherers? The _Singularity._ Just like the Babylonians built themselves graven images to assist them in their lives, so to do we conceive of building ourselves a God.

So, if it's a concrete jungle out there, and we behave like selfish, stifled, pent up animals, then it only figures. It's made of concrete, and it's populated by naked apes who know how to make really good digging sticks/clubs. After all, isn't an atom bomb just a really big stick? And isn't money just a stand in for groundnuts?

The Brocking Report, Incarnate

This is supposed to be integrated with G+, now.

Are you ready, Dr. Bernardo?

Throw the switch!